Alienware Laptops

[lee_orn]

1 225-2945 Alienware M17X R4 with Soft Touch - Direct
1 317-9735 3rd Generation Intel Core i7-3610QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)
1 317-9739 6GB DDR3 at 1600MHz
1 331-6912 English Keyboard, 101 Key, M17X R4
1 320-3275 17.3-inch WideFHD1920 x 1080 60Hz WLED
1 317-9747 2GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon HD 7970M
1 342-4414 500GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s
1 331-1350 Custom Nameplate
1 330-6106 Personalized Nameplate Trigger
1 331-6859 AlienFX Color, Quasar Blue
1 421-7439 Alienware Command Center Software, M17X
1 421-5789 Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit Service Pack 1, English, w/Media
1 318-2315 Nebula Red with Soft Touch Finish
1 410-0548 Adobe Acrobat Reader
1 318-2005 Slot-Loading Dual Layer DVD Burner (DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
1 318-0424 Internal High-Definition 5.1 Surround Sound Audio
1 430-4712 Killer Wireless-N 1103 a/g/n 3x3 MIMO for Gaming and Video and Bluetooth 4.0
1 430-4706 Internal Wireless Bluetooth 4.0
1 331-7193 Alienware M17x 240W A/C Adapter
1 331-6865 Alienware Documentation
1 331-6868 Placement, M17X R4
1 331-6866 Shipping Material, M17X R4 - Red
1 461-8389 NO VIRUS PROTECTION REQUESTED
1 331-6909 Resource DVD, M17X R4
1 331-8045 Windows 7 OS Label, Alienware Notebooks
1 420-9691 DataSafe Local BackUp
1 420-9956 PC Restore
1 421-0092 DELL-DOWNLOAD-FLAG
1 421-3874 Camera Software 2.X, Factory Install
1 421-4289 Dell Support Center Software 3.0
1 421-7440 Quickset, M17X R4
1 312-1334 90WHr 9-Cell Primary Battery
1 995-6083 Dell Hardware Warranty Plus On-Site Service, Initial Year
1 995-6103 In-Home Service after Remote Diagnosis, Parts and Labor On-Site Response, Initial Year
1 950-3337 1 Year Limited Warranty

I bought this laptop last week, but I'm having second thoughts about it. I've read some horror stories about the quality of these machines. Hopefully, these are just dated issues from 2009 and earlier. Does anyone have any experience with these and can vouch for its quality?

 

[Pinhedd]

I have an M17x R3 and the build quality is outstanding. Alienware had a well deserved bad reputation for building shitty laptops several years ago but this all changed when they were acquired by Dell to serve as their high-end gaming lineup.

The only thing I would do is ditch the 6GB of DDR3 and replace it with 16GB of nice Kingston Hyper-X DDR3-1600 SDRAM. Also consider putting in some Seagate Momentus XT hard drives in RAID for a very nice storage setup. You can make both of these changes aftermarket of course.

 

[lee_orn]

I have an M17x R3 and the build quality is outstanding. Alienware had a well deserved bad reputation for building shitty laptops several years ago but this all changed when they were acquired by Dell to serve as their high-end gaming lineup.

The only thing I would do is ditch the 6GB of DDR3 and replace it with 16GB of nice Kingston Hyper-X DDR3-1600 SDRAM. Also consider putting in some Seagate Momentus XT hard drives in RAID for a very nice storage setup. You can make both of these changes aftermarket of course.

Awesome! Yes. I can make those changes, but what would actually use up to 16 gb of ram? What's the actual price for all of these combined?

 

[Pinhedd]

Awesome! Yes. I can make those changes, but what would actually use up to 16 gb of ram? What's the actual price for all of these combined?

Windows will automatically use any spare RAM as a disk cache, which comes in handy for pretty much everything. The SandyBridge/IvyBridge architectures also make amazing virtual machine processors and more RAM always comes in handy for running VMWare Workstation / VMWare Player. I don't know if you do anything like that but it's always fun to play around with.

When I bought my laptop DDR3-1600 SODIMMs were just starting to come off the line and I paid $129 for each 8GB set, that same set is now down to around $70

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104230

There are other DDR3-1600 SODIMMs but most of them have significantly looser timings. Keep in mind that if you want to go with 4 DIMMs you will have to remove the keyboard to get at the two slots that are under it. This requires a bit of surgery but there are plenty of guides on the net.

The Hybrid-HDDs are similarly priced. The 500GB model that I have which has 4GB of hardware controlled SSD cache is $89, the newer 750GB model that has 8GB of hardware controlled SSD cache is $149. The SSD cache is hardware controlled and operates at the sector level and thus works in RAID.

So, aftermarket upgrades would ideally be:

2x70 + 2x150 = $440 which is probably what Dell would charge you just for the 16GB of RAM alone.

Of course you could always just go with one set of RAM and a single hard drive which cuts that in half and even install more later on.

Lastly, what's the price difference between the 3610 and the 3720? If it's not significant I would upgrade because the 3720 is quite a bit better